Jon, who leafleted with Darina at Ignite
Fest in Schaumburg, IL, writes:

Ignite Fest in Schaumburg
proved to be a successful event. On Saturday we arrived a few hours
before the event ended, hoping to catch people leaving after some big
name acts finished, but the security was such that we needed to leave
and come back for the ending. Saturday was fairly rough - we received
a decent amount of antagonism from people, which is a strange reaction
at CVA events. I even had one guy become belligerent with me, yelling
at me that we are allowed to eat meat, that the bible said so, and
questioned who I thought I was to tell him what he could and couldn't
eat. I was super polite with this person, asking him to just read the
booklet and he would understand why, if nothing else, that Jesus would
look differently on modern animal farms. However, he had his own
agenda to prove, and continued yelling after me for a minute even
after I decided to just walk away. We didn't let that spoil our night
however, and continued leafleting until the crowd died down.

Darina had a much different experience on Sunday, citing numerous
positive reactions and supportive feedback from the crowd. She didn't
have any negative experiences, and said that several people thanked
her for what she was doing. Overall, we handed out 679 booklets.

Last week, I
encouraged people to comment on the following passage from Milan
Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“True human
goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only
when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its
fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its
attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this
respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so
fundamental that all others stem from it.”

Gracia Fay
Ellwood writes:

I tend to feel at a gut level that Kundera is
right about all debacles stemming from this one. Yet something gives
me pause. In the heady early days of the feminist Second Wave, the
idea was common that when the heavy power imbalance between the sexes
was corrected--when women were as much taken for granted as
politicians and professors and ministers (et al) as men, the major
evils in our culture would be done away: women would be more
assertive, men no longer macho and aggressive. Equality, healthy
parenting, freedom! We are much closer to that ideal now than in the
'sixties and 'seventies, but things are still very bad, especially in
the political and ecological realms; we are almost more of a
plutucracy now than a democracy, and the fate of the earth is hanging
on a thread.

So what if we humans stopped exploiting
animals, and especially raising animals to eat? Certainly the planet
would be much better off, but would we be free of the evils of
plutocracy, of the Big Lie, of aggressive wars, of major corruption in
high places? Even now there are firebrand animal activists who care
so much that they would sacrifice everything for animals, but who hate
exploiters so intensely that they are ready for violence, verbal and
physical. Would all people become peaceful once we human societies
were at peace with our furry and feathered cousins? I hope so, but I
can't feel assured of it.

Julius Johnston writes:

Very good passage from Milan Kundera – he is of course right.

If man can only be kind or respect those that are strong or protected
by the strong, man is no more than what the imprisoned Marquis de Sade
thought.

Vegetarians and respecters of animals are “Purists,”
they try to weed out the hypocrisy and wrath in the human soul